Authors: Arnold Rampersad
Both parents were children of the West and the Southwest. Zellee’s father, C. T. Jones, had come from Atlanta; her mother, Annetta Garza Jones, was from Houston. They had lived as pioneering entrepreneurs in the Southwest, where Zellee grew up; at one point, C. T. Jones had apparently owned the largest café, a pool hall, and a theater on the main street of Nogales, on the Mexican border, as well as many acres of land thought to be rich in silver. Zellee had grown up well-to-do in Arizona and, for a while, Mexico; she spoke Spanish fluently. For two years she had studied at Tuskegee Institute in Alabama. Then the family businesses began to fail. About this time, Zellee eloped with a man who turned out to be worthless, except for the birth of her first child, Charles Williams. After C.T.’s death, his widow, Annetta, moved to Los Angeles to be near her daughter and her new family.
Rachel’s charm and drive had everything to do with the way her parents had brought her up. “
My father was sick for a long time,” she recalled. “He could do very little without being exhausted, which was hard on a man who had been a sportsman, gregarious, really popular. He was often near death. But he was tender and loving, and seemed to favor me over my brothers.” Her mother, too, loved her, but set lofty goals and strict standards for her daughter. In preparing for her career as a caterer, she asked Rachel to assume many tasks in the house, including cleaning, cooking, and shopping.
“My mother wanted a lot from me, but she also gave me a lot,” Rachel said. “She had impeccable manners, and when she spoke she was articulate and very careful about what she said; she was proper, always proper, and she expected the same of me.” Rachel learned about the importance of personal grooming, from meticulous coiffure to garments that aspired to elegance rather than flash. In addition, she had to be self-sufficient. Her first job outside the home was at the public library, where her mother provided food. “By the time I was ten,” Rachel said, “they had me in a black uniform with a little white organdy apron. I got fifty cents every time I helped. I liked helping, but I also loved the fifty cents. I think that was the whole point.”
At home, she washed and scrubbed and polished to meet the meticulous standards set by her mother. Zellee also assigned her the task of taking care of both her younger brother and her father, so that drudgery and love came together, arm in arm. An electric bell alerted her when her father, who had his own bedroom, was in trouble: “
He needed me so much that I felt I was like his guardian angel. I watched him and watched over him all the time.” At times she felt oppressed, but she seldom rebelled. She and her mother became close. Zellee loved to cook, and she taught Rachel her secrets. They also loved music, both at home, where Rachel had her upright piano and the treasured violin someone had sold to her mother’s father as a Stradivarius (it was not), and at Saturday concerts of the Los Angeles Philharmonic. Once, gloriously, they heard there the contralto voice of Marian Anderson.
As Rachel became a woman, her mother had watched her vigilantly, and especially when boys were around. “
She had nothing to worry about with me,” Rachel later insisted, “but she worried. I had a boyfriend named Eddie, tall and sweet, who arranged his classes so he could walk me to school and come home from school with me. We would talk on the phone for hours or sit on my steps. My mother watched from all sorts of doors and windows. But I gave her nothing to worry about. I let Eddie kiss me only when he had met my two terms: I had to be sixteen, and he had to join my church. I was sixteen, and he joined Bethel AME on 35th Street, so I let him kiss me. That’s what I was like in those days!”
Rachel also had the residue of a nagging adolescent unhappiness about her body. She had been too tall; towering over boys in elementary school, she had felt unfeminine. Her cheeks were too round, not hollow like those of the reigning beauties. Her breasts were too large too soon, so that she walked on campus with her books pressed against them. Her hair was too thick, too stiff: “
All my sorrows were there in my hair, the endless trouble and grief”—the hot straightening comb, the burns. Her skin was too brown, according to the perverse color-and-caste thinking of the day: she was darker than her mother, who was darker than
her
mother. Once, the
mother of a pale-skinned boy down the block almost closed her front door on Rachel, who never went there again. Also hard had been her mother’s insistence that Rachel play the violin in public as a small child. “Encouraging me to appreciate and love music and to play, that was fine. But making me perform at six and seven, before I was ready—that was traumatic. I was a very shy child. Still, I was happy and loved, and self-confident in many ways.”
Rachel, more winsome now than shy, knew who Jack Robinson was; in high school, she had seen him play football. She had thought him conceited then, because he stood in the backfield with his hands on his hips, all too nonchalant in awaiting the violence at hand; then she found out that this was only a style and had little to do with his character. She never forgot their first meeting, and Ray Bartlett introducing her to Jack. “
I remember the awkwardness of the moment. What I liked about Jack was his smile, and a kind of confident air he had about him, without being cocky in person.” She also noticed then that Robinson wore white shirts almost exclusively. A snow-white shirt against a sable skin: “I thought to myself, Now why would he do that? Why would anybody that dark wear a white shirt? It’s terrible!” But Jack seemed not to care. “He wore his color with such dignity and pride and confidence that after a little while I didn’t even think about it. He wouldn’t let me. He was never, ever, ashamed of his color.”
Soon Jack and Rachel were seeing each other every day. “
I was the aggressor, no doubt about it,” Rachel confessed. “I would sit in my car and wait for him to drive into the parking lot. He was always running late, but I would wait. I would find a dozen excuses for walking through Kerckhoff Hall to see if he was pushing his mop.” Then they would sit and talk and learn about one another. The differences were clear. “Intense” about her studies and accustomed to excellence, Rachel would have tried for medical school (following a cousin in Texas, who was herself a doctor) if Zellee had not counseled a career in nursing, the easier for Rachel to marry and start a family. Now she was enrolled in the five-year Bachelor of Science degree course in nursing at the university. Jack confided to her that he wanted to be a coach, which seemed reasonable enough. To Rachel, he seemed to have no interest in his studies: “I even thought he was being coached by faculty to get through his courses. His mind was very much on athletics. I could see he was intelligent, but I never thought of him as a student at all.”
Rachel brought Jack home to the house on 36th Place, where he found a detached frame bungalow that her father had bought years before. A devoted gardener, he had planted so many roses, camellias, dahlias, and hydrangea bushes that the house stood out in the neighborhood. Jack immediately won Zellee over; she saw him from the start as a gentle person,
a gentleman, serious and religious, as well as handsome. “
He was Zellee’s dream guy from the start,” according to Rachel. “She was far more sure about him than I was.” But her father was not smitten with Jack. As with all of Rachel’s boyfriends, “my father was jealous of Jack, tremendously jealous. What was this big star athlete doing with his little daughter, just a freshman? He sulked and rumbled. He took it hard. But my mother never budged, and my mother had the last word in our household.” Jack’s sister, Willa Mae, declared: “
Rachel’s father didn’t like Jack because he was too black—and Jack understood that very well.” But Willa Mae never met Rachel’s father, who was known in the community for his race pride. “
Jack’s color would not have been an issue for him,” Rachel insisted. In any event, her father’s hostility had little or no effect on the way Jack felt about Rachel.
In turn, Jack took Rachel home to Pepper Street. She would remember a rocking chair on the porch, crochet doilies on the upholstered furniture, and lots of family photographs on the walls. The house was simply furnished but clean and neat. The Robinsons were all friendly. Edgar was sweet, but he was also strange, with his averted glances and halting speech. Mack’s infant son, Phillip, was sadly retarded. What was wrong here? On the other hand, she liked Mack and Willa Mae, who seemed perfectly fine. Most important of all, Jack’s mother, Mallie, was a woman one had to respect and like. “
Mallie was very gracious and kind to me,” Rachel would say, “and right from the beginning I could tell that there was no competition or conflict with her. She thought of me the way my mother thought of Jack: Here’s a girl in the church, she doesn’t drink or smoke, a good student, going into nursing, no other boyfriends. Everything that she would have wanted for Jack—that was me. And I could relate to her very well, in her own struggle, what she had gone through just to be there.”
For their first date, Jack sealed his romance with Rachel in October when he invited her, not Bessie Renfro, to the homecoming dance on November 2 at the premier hotel in Los Angeles, the Biltmore. Nervous and excited, Rachel bought a stunning black dress and a chic matching black hat with fox trim; escorted by Jack in his one suit, she set out for the Biltmore wrapped in the black broadtail fur coat that was her grandmother’s pride. Both because they were black and because of Jack’s fame, they found themselves the focus of some attention; but they also felt a tension that had everything to do with their awareness of each other’s bodies, still unknown. “The evening was fun but never completely comfortable,” Rachel said. “It was stilted. Jack was a little awkward, I was confused.” She was a very good dancer; less adept, he was unwilling to venture beyond a two-step even for a waltz. Still, they tried to relax to the orchestral strains of Hoagy Carmichael’s “Star Dust” and Duke Ellington’s “Mood Indigo” and all the
other haunting tunes that young people danced to in the peaceful autumn of 1940 in America.
When Jack and Rachel returned to her home, he said goodbye quickly. “I was excited and happy and full of anticipation, wondering on the ride home whether he would kiss me,” she remembered. “I wanted him to; I really wanted him to kiss me. He pecked me on the cheek. That was all. I was disappointed.” Their deepening feeling for one another was shot through with a bracing sense of propriety. For both, a sexual relationship at this point was out of the question. Scrupulous and shrewd, Rachel would never have consented; the almost equally self-disciplined Jack had no desire to press hard, if he pressed at all. Undoubtedly he was already thinking of her as possibly his future wife, and accordingly had placed her on a pedestal, the better to worship her. So much was uncertain about their lives, even as they grew more certain of their love for one another. Jack and Rachel would know one another, and be committed to one another, for more than five years before they finally consummated their romance, and they would do so only within a week or so of their wedding day.
A
T
UCLA,
THE 1940
football season opened on a note of high expectation, with Robinson at its center. His “
colossalness,” the
Bruin
enthused, “is almost universal knowledge among football fans all over the country”; he was “beyond doubt the Coast’s No. 1 candidate for all-American honors.” His sensational running behind the new UCLA line would make the Bruins “the greatest drawing card in the nation.”
Nevertheless, the season turned out to be a disaster for the Bruins even as Jack shone as an individual. In the opener against Southern Methodist University, UCLA suffered a narrow loss; its sole touchdown came when Robinson gathered in a punt on his own 13-yard line, raced straight ahead, swerved dramatically left, “
and went all the way by himself as the Mustangs stood petrified.” The only Bruin win (against nine losses) came in mid-November against Washington State in “
a wild and woolly, free-scoring orgy” in which Robinson turned in “one of the most amazing performances ever witnessed in the Coliseum.” Passing for one touchdown, he ran 60 dazzling yards for another, then sealed the victory with a 75-yard ramble to score in the final minutes.
For the season, Jack finished second in the conference in total offense. His running average dropped from the heights of the previous year to only 3.64 yards per carry, but he averaged 21 yards on his punt returns, when he was most free to improvise, to set a national record. He was also the third leading passer in California football. However, with the Associated Press
calling UCLA the biggest disappointment of the season, he earned only honorable mention as an all-American.
At this point, with his football eligibility used up, Robinson was surely tempted to walk away from UCLA. As a student, he was now in sharp decline. He would earn an A, a C, and a D in three courses in physical education. He would earn a C in geology but end with a D in history and an E in military science. He was starting to fall behind.
One reason for him to stay was Rachel’s presence, although they had gone on no dates after the event at the Biltmore. They saw each other on campus, where they were now recognized as a pair, or Jack visited Rachel at her home. Jack’s reluctance to arrange dates bothered Rachel a little, but she adjusted to his quirks of personality, his mixture of nice manners and mannish roughness, his silences, his passionate but also self-disciplined way of being. “
A lot of it,” she said, “had to do with his sense of himself as an athlete, the idea that he couldn’t abuse his body. One thing he was always harping on: he had to be home and asleep by midnight. His body demanded it, his training as an athlete demanded it. He would never lose that sense of himself as in training, or having to be in training even if he also didn’t like to exercise. That idea definitely got in the way of a lot of fun!”
He decided to sign on for another basketball season with Coach Wilbur Johns, who believed that were it not for his devotion to football, Robinson might have become “
the greatest of all basketball players. His timing was perfect. His rhythm was unmatched. He had the valuable faculty of being able to relax at the proper time.” Above all, Jack “always placed the welfare of his team above his chance for greater stardom.” His right hand injured, Jack for a while shot the ball with his left but still managed to be a scoring threat. Nevertheless, the Bruins struggled in almost every game. Jack also had to contend with constant rough play. Once again vying for the individual scoring title, he was an obvious target; in one game at Berkeley, the
Bruin
complained, he was “
viciously treated.” At home, however, he was a hero. Early in March, when Coach Johns took him out of the last game of the “
long, weary basketball season,” Robinson received a thunderous ovation that acknowledged his heroic efforts on behalf of the Bruins over the preceding two years.